No One You Know in Hungary
Here’s the Hungarian cover of No One You Know. The Hungarian edition, Nikt kogo znasz, translated by Bo?ena Markiewicz, will be published by Videograf, which also published The Year of Fog.
Now in Stores: Dream of the Blue Room
The new edition features an interview, playlist, and reading group guide. Random House has also released the novel as an e-book.
For MJ Rose’s Backstory, I wrote about how my Alabama childhood, combined with a classified job ad in the New York Times and an extended trip to China in 1998, inspired Dream of the Blue Room. And for Meg Waite Clayton’s 1st Books: Stories of How Writers Got Started, I wrote about the “>challenging path to publication. A lot has changed in my life as a writer since I first heard the news that Dream of the Blue Room would be published by a small independent publisher in San Francisco, but some things haven’t changed a bit: writing a book is still about sitting down at the desk and putting the words down.
About the Book:
Jenny and Amanda Ruth were best friends in a small Alabama town until eighteen-years-old Amanda Ruth was murdered. Now, fourteen years later, Jenny has traveled with her husband to China to scatter Amanda Ruth’s ashes and finally fulfill her friend’s dream of visiting her Chinese father’s homeland. It’s also, Jenny hopes, an opportunity to repair her own troubled marriage. But as she journeys through a foreign landscape, the guilty secrets of Jenny’s past rise up and her life will be inexorably altered.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Fog (“Highly recommended [for fans of] authors like Jodi Picoult and Jacquelyn Mitchard” —Library Journal, starred review) and No One You Know (“Luminous . . . will keep you thinking long after the last page has been turned”—Family Circle), Michelle Richmond’s stunning novel captivates with its depiction of the powerful intimacies of marriage, friendship, and family that shape our paths and the bonds of home that buoy us—wherever home may be.
Kirkus Reviews:
“An exotic and nimbly fashioned first novel about a troubled young woman hoping to save her marriage while on a cruise down the Yangtze River…splendid… Eloquently, the naive American finds heroic fortitude in an ancient, ambiguous land.”
South Florida Sun Sentinal:
“In any work of fiction that raises our sights to higher truths, as this one does, the writer has done her job.”
Library Journal
“Jenny and Amanda Ruth’s Alabama childhood is richly drawn. Richmond is a writer to watch.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Intelligent, original, complex.”
Books in Berkeley
Frances Dinkelspiel did a nice write-up for Berkeley Inside about the 8th Annual Author’s Dinner at the Berkeley Public Library on Saturday. The food and wine were over-the-top wonderful (especially the homemade banana ice cream), and I had a great time catching up with Rabih Alameddine (The Hakawati), Daniel Mason (The Piano Tuner), Alan Black (Kick the Balls), Frances (Towers of Gold), and lots of other writer folks I tend to only see when I come out of hiding for literary events. I had a chance to chat with Tom Leonard, head of the UC Berkeley Libraries, about e-books, the Google Books settlement, and digitization in general. Many thanks to the Berkelely Library Foundation, and to Linda Schacht Gage, whom I met last year at a wonderful UC Berkeley Library Story Hour featuring Michael Ondaatje, Michael Chabon, and Robert Haas. I’ll be appearing at Story Hour on April 8.
Also on Saturday, I participated in the Berkeley/Oakland Festival of Women Authors at the Berkeley Marina. More than 250 women attended the event. They were a terrific audience, and the ticket sales went to benefit the programs of the YWCA. The other authors were Bonnie Tsui, Vivienne Sonowski, and Dana Whitaker.
Who Moved My Buy Button?
The Authors Guild has launched a website, WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, “which allows authors to keep track of whether Amazon has removed buy buttons from any of their books.”
Although we’ve launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in response to Amazon’s wholesale removal of buy buttons from Macmillan titles, we believe Amazon should be monitored for years to come. Amazon’s developed quite a fondness for employing this draconian tactic (there’s a chronology at the website); it’s only grown bolder with its growing market clout.
Interestingly, the new kid on the e-reader block, ipad, has changed the game by allowing publishers to set their own prices for ebooks. Newser reports that “Hachette has joined Macmillan—and, seemingly, HarperCollins—in demanding control over the pricing of its e-books sold through Amazon…”
A note to readers, regarding Amazon
I have long used the Amazon widget on this page because it offers the cleanest graphics and is the easiest way to create a linked, text-enriched slideshow of one’s books–capabilities which, unfortunately, are not yet available to authors through indiebound. For the moment, however, the Amazon widget has been removed from this page as I consider the implications of Amazon’s recent decision to remove “buy” buttons from books published by MacMillan. In response to MacMillan’s concern over bargain-basement e-book pricing by Amazon, the online retail giant emerged as the bully of the literary marketing playground, denying consumers access not only to e-books by MacMillan authors, but also to physical copies of those books.
While my publisher, Random House, was not affected by the Amazon move, this was the latest in a round of wake-up calls to authors and publishers about just how aggressively Amazon is willing to be in its attempts to dictate the prices of books. We authors want to be read, and we are happy when worn-out copies of our books are passed from hand to hand. But Amazon’s price-fixing scheme is a Toys-R-Us approach to bookselling, an attempt to monopolize the market at the expense of those who write books, those who publish them, and ultimately those who read them. Much lower pricing means books have to be produced faster; the quality of books on offer can only be negatively affected by lightning fast turn-around times for authors and editors. It’s the difference between a blog post like this one and a well-researched essay in Harper’s magazine. While we all enjoy our quick fixes, we want the stuff that’s been labored over as well, the artfully written and meticulously crafted novels that make reading such a pleasure and an addiction.
If giant retailers exert a controlling force on publishers in the manner that Amazon is attempting to do, there will be less and less room in the literary market for mid-list authors who enter the publishing world as I did ten years ago, with a small literary book from a small press. I was one of the ones who eventually “got lucky,” in a commercial sense, with a major publisher and a “breakout” book. But the publisher didn’t know that The Year of Fog would be a breakout when they acquired it. It was a small acquisition by a major publisher, one of those novels that a wonderful editor decided to fight for, despite my less-than-impressive track record when it came to sales. We’ve all heard the term “too big to fail.” There is such a thing, in the publishing world, as “too small to sell”–or there will be, when every book is priced at $9.99 or less upon release. In such cases, publishers will be able to stay afloat only with the Dan Browns and J.K. Rowlings of the world, authors whose books will sell millions of copies simply on the strength of the name. The success of The Year of Fog never would have been possible had the publisher rejected my manuscript because it was “too small to sell.”
In a world where price is the predominating criteria, publishers would be unlikely to make the gamble on authors without a proven track record–in other words, authors like me, and almost every author I know. It might be a beautiful new world for zombie novels, or vampire novels, or for whatever books fit into the literary fad of the moment. But should Amazon have its way, finding literary or mainstream novels by writers simply struggling to get a book out into the world would become increasingly difficult for readers.
Three leaders of the women’s rights movement in Haiti–Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan–died in last week’s earthquake. Read the story here. Merlet, who fled Haiti in the 70s and returned in teh 80s, described the challenges facing women in her homeland in an essay for the anthology Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance
“While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman,” she wrote. “We’re a country in which three-fourths of the people can’t read and don’t eat properly. I’m an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don’t mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them.”
Do you Kindle? Do you Nook?
I still love the brick-and-mortar stores, especially in the Bay Area, where we’re blessed with amazing independents. Personal preference aside, however, I do believe that, in the next couple of years, e-books will take over a huge share of the market.
One thing paperbacks currently have going for them in the book vs. Kindle debate is price point. The price set by publishers for e-books tends to be the lowest price at which the physical copy of the book is available. For the moment, this may be keeping brick-and-mortar doomsday at bay. If you can have a physical trade paperback for the same price as the e-book, I imagine many readers would prefer to have the physical book on their shelf.
Where I can see e-books easily gaining the lion’s share of the market is in the mass market format. For example, because THE YEAR OF FOG was published both in trade paperback ($12.00) and mass market paperback ($5.99), the lowest price point for the physical book, and therefore the base price of the e-book, is $5.99. On Amazon, that comes out to $4.79 for the Kindle version. While a mass market paperback is far less pleasing in the hand than a trade paperback, thus ensuring the trade paperback success of many books that are also available in the smaller, cheaper format, the e-book may make this distinction null and void. In fact, the heft of the Kindle, and the adjustable text size, may make an e-book preferable to a mass market version of the same book.
Defenders of the Kindle and Nook attempt to assuage the fears of luddites, publishers, and authors, by saying that e-book readers actually purchase three times more books than readers of physical books. While the evidence isn’t quite in yet on this assertion, if e-book pricing were to come down to the level of mass market pricing, I do think you would see e-book readers purchasing larger quantities of books than their more traditional counterparts. A book that you didn’t quite feel like investing in for $12.00 might be an easy impulse buy at $5.99.
Totally unscientific poll: Have you purchased an e-reader? If so, do you find yourself buying more books than before? If you do buy more books, do you think this habit will continue after the hot-new-thing quality of your Kindle/Nook has worn off?
Non e-readers: If e-book pricing were comparable to mass market pricing, would you be more likely to invest in a Kindle or Nook?
No One You Know in Germany
I just saw the cover for the German translation of No One You Know, which will be published by Diana (Random House Germany) in June. I think it coincides nicely with the German edition of The Year of Fog. I love it when covers of books by the same author have a certain continuity, as with the Harper Perennial reprint editions of the novels of John Fante
And here’s The Year of Fog:
Who knew…
..that Rainn Wilson, the guy who plays Dwight Shrute on The Office, has a smart, funny blog
…that a parking garage could look so mod, courtesy of photographer Jenna Brown (No Room for Necklaces) in Charleston
…that I should have saved this wine for a night when I wasn’t home alone with my kid, reading dinosaur pop-up books (not that there’s anything wrong with dinosaur pop-up books, but some wines are meant to be shared)
